Deathlord: The first Word

Last post I explored the continents of Nyuku and Chigaku. I skipped the Nyuku dungeon for now because I'm not even close to ready for it, but I decided I was going to take on the Chigaku dungeons.

The first is the Troll Hole, though I always called it the Sunken City. (partially because "Troll Hole" sounds dumb IMO, partially because that's what I called it as a kid) The Troll Hole is the first of the "Word" dungeons. As the manual (and various townspeople) state, you need to find seven words to finish the game. Each one of these words is at the bottom of a dungeon. They don't change from game to game so if you knew them all in advance you could skip the dungeons completely.

In terms of design the Word Dungeons run the gamut--three are pretty good, three are awful, and one is in the middle--though trending slightly to the annoying. The Troll Hole is that "middle" dungeon.

The Troll Hole's basic concept isn't that bad. In fact it's pretty cool. The "theme" is visible right out the gate:

Nice concept, annoying terrain.

The Troll Hole is an underground troll city, complete with roads, buildings, storehouses, a mansion of sorts, even a garden/central meeting place. However by order of the shogun the city was completely flooded. A lot of the water drained, leaving fetid stagnant pools behind. And as you can see from the above screenshot, there's swampy terrain everywhere.

That swampy terrain is what makes the Troll Hole an annoying place to visit. Swamp only does 1HP damage to the party per step, but that adds up, and unlike fire or acid, there's no way to mitigate the damage. The shortest route to the bottom of the dungeon requires you to step through over 150 tiles of swamp--more than enough to kill all but very high level characters. And that's not even figuring in combats or getting back out.

So there's going to be a lot of resting being done in here. You definitely want your food stores at full before taking on the dungeon, though that can be supplemented with a Shizen's TABEMONO spell.

The first level of the Troll Hole is remarkably empty:

As you can see from the map, there's a grand total of two secrets in the whole level; one secret door in the middle of the floor that leads to a pathway with four treasures, and an illusion wall that leads to another small batch of chests. I skipped the secret door entirely, rather than waste HP trying to find a secret door for a mere four chests/pots. I didn't bypass this pool though:

Didn't do any good though.

Nearly all of the water in the Troll Hole is "bad" water and will make you sick. There are a few minor exceptions, and this is one. Generally, if you're looking for "good" water that could possibly raise stats, it's more likely to be in a single isolated tile of it like it is here.

I decided to go for the second treasure area on this level; I also camped for a good long while there. I lost a lot of food in the process, but Gio's TABEMONO spell on the grass tile alleviated that to an extent. On the way back I ran into one of the eponymous trolls of the area:

There are many, many trolls here.

Trolls are the toughest enemy you'll find down here but they're not that bad. Each can strike three times per round but they don't hit very often and do a very modest amount of damage when they do.

The second level of the Troll hole is similar to the first:

A lot of swamp terrain, a lot of foul water. There are three "good" pools of water but one of them is behind so much swamp that I skipped it. There are two secrets on this level, both illusionary walls. The first leads to a small treasure chamber, but the second, in a nondescript hallway, is needed to find the way down to the next level. Fortunately the devs were kind enough to put this latter illusionary wall by a grass tile rather than a swamp tile. The natural tendency in the Troll Hole is not to search for secret doors on a swamp tile; if you run into a wall or otherwise fail to find a secret door, you continue to take damage each turn.

That's actually a small mercy in this dungeon; with one exception, every required secret is by a grass tile rather than a swamp tile. That doesn't stop the irritation of draining HP exploring around dead-ends if you're navigating this dungeon without a map though.

There is one interesting feature on this floor, a troll temple:

This doesn't mean anything, it's just flavor text

However there's nothing in there but an impassible pool of water. If you had the Genkai's water-walking spell (a level 6 spell) you could just walk across it as a less-damaging shortcut but I didn't have it yet. As we'll see there are plenty of places in this dungeon that spell would be useful.

By the time I reached level 3 my party was seriously injured from the swamps and needed to rest:

I figured that little dead-end by the up stairway would be a good place to rest as it's tricky to path to. I was wrong, and was ambushed by trolls and Kaibu constantly. My food was also hovering around the mid-60s party-wise which wasn't good; I've got 6 more levels to go counting the way back up.


As you can see from this map, there are a lot of dead ends. Especially dead ends blocked by water. You can take some prime shortcuts with that Genkai spell I didn't have yet, otherwise you may find yourself backtracking a lot. There's some good treasure here too. Normally I wouldn't go out of my way to get to the treasure areas in the swamps but this is worth it. On the way there I tried one of those "good" pools in hope that one of Shuten's physical stats would be boosted but got an unexpected result:

Well, I guess "sex" could count as a stat...

Shuten had his (or I guess "her" now?) sex changed by the pool. It's a small chance, but it does happen. Of course sex is entirely cosmetic in Deathlord so this doesn't matter at all. Maybe it'll change again later, maybe it won't, but it doesn't really make any difference.

By the time I made it to the next floor, with all the resting and healing, my food was in the upper 40s/low 50s, though I boosted that into the 70s with TABEMONO spells. I decided I was OKish to keep going but that was borderline; if I didn't have a Shizen to create more I would have had to leave and restock food. Down to the next floor:

The most noticeable thing on this floor is the sparsity of "safe" tiles. The other noticable thing is there is a lot of treasure to be found, but it's all behind secret doors. There's one treasure trove behind two secret doors in a palace of sorts in the northeast corner of the level. Notice there's one coffin in the middle of a lot of other coffers--a sole coffin is often bad news in Deathlord, as we saw in the newbie dungeon. As is the case here:

I was extremely lucky that all three Banshees attacked and missed, instead of doing something else.

Yikes. Banshees are as bad as Vampires. They're a little easier to kill, having fewer HP and a worse AC, but they're every bit as deadly, with level-draining attacks and a scream that acts as a mass death spell. Had there only been one I probably would have stayed and fought but instead I used Frank's NIGERU spell to escape.

Around the fountain with the "good" water tile in the south-center of the level, I decided to take my chances and go for a shortcut with Tomoe's UGOKU spell. It took a couple of castings but I eventually ended up here:

Lucky!

If you look at the map of the level you can see I bypassed a lot of swamp tiles, and ended up straight in the middle of the town's storehouses. After looting them I noticed I was getting quite rich, with nearly 40000 gold between my party members.

More importantly I was much closer to the main goal of this dungeon, the word that I needed. It's on a sign that seems inaccessible. There's a trick to reading this word, and an easy and a hard way to get to it.

Well, there it is, now how do I read it?

The hard way--which is the way I accomplished this the first time I beat this game, is to cast the Genkai's water-walking spell and simply walk over the water to read the sign. That requires a relatively high-level Genkai though. The second is to walk through the west wall, which leads to a series of secret doors that lead to the sign:

This could be 不信, (distrust) 不振, (non-prosperous) or 不審 (suspicious). Don't know which.

Incidentally the tile by the sign is a great place to rest. Now that I had the word (which in the old days you'd have to write down--no in-game journals and the like) it was time to begin the slog back up to the surface.

Now, before I leave, there's one more oddity about this dungeon I can demonstrate here. (with a little cheating to artificially boost my party's levels) There are actually multiple dungeons that you can do this, and it has to do with the way that dungeons in Deathlord are constructed. As you can see from the maps so far, dungeon level are generally 32 x 32 tile affairs while towns are 64 x 64 instead. In fact, however, dungeons are also 64 x 64 areas, just four separate 32 x 32 areas stitched together as A, B, C, and D. Below is the actual full map of the Troll Hole, divided into four 32 x 32 quadrants:

Now, why they didn't just shift this whole dungeon over one tile right I don't know. But you can see that on level 4 and 2, there are actually a few tiles that bleed into what would be 3 and 1. This doesn't matter really for the most part. But there's a level 6 Mahotsukai spell, UNPAN, which will teleport you up or down levels, to the exact same equivalent tile. In other words if you cast UNPAN up one level on level 4, you're really just being moved 32 tiles to the left. So what happens if you cast this spell while standing on one of those "overlapping" tiles, like this?

Cheating Tomoe's level up so she can cast the spell...

The answer is, it teleports you straight off the map:

Level...0?

In this case it's less spectacular than some of the other dungeons because it looks like you're teleported into the middle of the wall, but if you look at the above stitched-together map you'll see that it's actually outside the boundaries of the map. I've actually looped around and am on x-coordinate 255 in the above screenshot. In some places you can actually walk around outside the boundaries of the world, which have seemingly arbitrary contents. There's no actual value in doing any of this, it's just an interesting quirk that's entirely exploitable within the game's rules.

Anyhow, restoring the game to a non-cheated state, it's a long slog back to the surface. I used Tomoe's UGOKU spell several times successfully to take shortcuts (and one unfortunate casting that put me in an even worse spot) but made it out of the dungeon with my food in the 20s. I think I cleared that dungeon with the bare minimum in terms of levels--the fights weren't particularly difficult but I can't imagine having survived that without level 4 Shisai, Shizen, and Mahotsukai spells.

Next up was the other dungeon on Chigaku, Shumi's Tower, but I needed to restock first. Irritatingly enough there are no food merchants on the entire continent so I had to sail all the way back to Kodan. While there I also trained my characters up two levels; they were all ready for the first and really close to the second so a little "exercise" in the Yakuza guild pushed them over the edge.

Heading back to Chigaku I entered Shumi's tower and got an immediate "welcome":

Ghouls paralyze--fortunately Shigeko had the MOTUNASU spell.

Dispatching the ghouls, I checked out the sign which read "Welcome to the tower of Shumi, come in and add to my collection of undead." If that wasn't enough of an indication, the theme of this dungeon is pretty clear--a necromancer's tower full of undead.

There are two notable features of the first floor. The first is the teleport-maze-in-darkness on the west half. As teleport mazes go, this one's not too bad; it's obvious when you get teleported and it's fairly simple. After your first teleport to the fake door, it's clear you need to start searching for secrets--in this case, illusion walls.

Speaking of fake doors, you should always try to lockpick a closed door when you come across one, whether or not you have a lockpick. If if you try to pick the lock of a fake door, you'll get the message "Nothing there!" instead of "Failed!" or "No Lockpick!" If I get either of those messages I know I'm OK to smash into the door. Otherwise you may find yourself smashing into a wall over and over.

At the end of the teleport maze I get a cryptic hint:

What does this mean?

I'm not sure what this means. Southeast of here sends you to either the continent of Osozaki or a couple of empty islands. I guess this might be a "hint" as to where Osozaki is since it's not printed on the poor excuse for a world map that comes with the game.

The other feature on this floor is the big maze in the southeast of the level. It's concealed by a secret door, though it's not hard to find when you otherwise map the level, as there's a huge empty area in a whole quadrant of the tower that sticks out like a sore thumb. This maze is an unfortunate feature that's all-too-common in Deathlord: the illusionary wall maze.

This is what you typically see in the middle of a illusion wall maze.

I hate these. They're an enormous pain to map and it's far too easy to lose your bearings. With no method to find your relative position in the dungeon you have to be extremely careful as you stumble through, otherwise you could get very stuck.  (As an aside, if you want to cheat, dungeon X/Y coordinates are stored at 01A1C7B5 and 01AC7BD respectively in VICE, keeping in mind the aforementioned 64x64 format of dugneons)

As illusion-wall dungeons go, though, this one is fairly tame, and I found the stairway down without too much trouble. (Even though this is a tower, I suspect the way dungeons are stored in Deathlord forced the use of "down" stairways rather than "up" stairways)

The second floor starts immediately with a pit trap that I missed. Climbing out I read the nearby sign which is a boring "go back." Almost immediately thereafter was the way to the next level. There isn't another way down; you can skip the rest of this floor immediately if you want. Of course I wasn't going to.

Going anywhere else in this level requires walking through fire, though. Fortunately I have the HITATE spell:

No damage - this is why you want a Shizen.

There's just one long corridor on both sides, leading to a treasure room with a significant number of chests and pots, but there are some painful obstacles in the way:

Nope, not worth it.

I wanted to try to cast UGOKU and hope I teleported into the treasure room, but it's much more likely to fail outright from this location. UGOKU will teleport you in an 8-tile radius in any direction, but will fail if the location it picks isn't open. When you're this close to the edge of the map, you're more likely than not to pick a bad location so casting the spell is just going to be a waste of power points.

There's a secret passageway on the west hallway though that leads me to an area where the teleport might work:

Despite being in a necromancer's lair, these coffins are either empty or have treasure.

Only one of those five doors is real. Using the lockpick trick I quickly found the correct one, in the middle. This led to another long series of locked doors. Yoshinaka had a lockpick but it quickly broke, so Shuten had to smash down the remainder. She was near death by the time I reached the end, where there was a sign:

Not funny, Deathlord.

Yes, it's yet another one of those "we're going to make you go through a long painful tedious process for absolutely no reward" shticks; Shigeko and Gio used most of their MP to get Shuten up to a respectable level. However this wasn't all for nothing--the "doors" corridor is probably the best place in the level to cast UGOKU as an attempt to get into the treasure chamber. And in fact after a couple of failed castings I did:

That's a Shadow. They're like Wraiths, only not as nasty since they paralyze instead of drain levels.

Teleporting out of here took forever; I had to rest twice to get Tomoe's MP back up to snuff. I decided to ignore the opposite treasure chamber entirely and go up to the next level.

The third floor starts with a dark corridor surrounding a room with a sole "good" pool. I decided I'd keep drinking these with Shuten until she returns to being a he. It didn't work this time, and refilled her HP instead. There are four adjoining doors, two that lead to apparent dead ends, one that leads to a room full of treasure coffins, and one that leads to a hallway with a chute down to the next floor.

You might notice from the map that a lot of the areas seem entirely inaccessible; the northeast and southeast quadrants. Theoretically you could use the dark corridor on the west side to get to the east side, but that would require you to get past the chute somehow. Those two areas of this level in fact are inaccessible without a teleport spell of some sort. I couldn't get into the southeast side reliably with UGOKU but I was able to get into that cemetary:

Those guys below the Wraiths are Mummies. They can disease you--yet another reason to have a Shizen.

The sign says "nursery" and there's a lot of fighting to be done here. I ran from the wraiths (level drain is awful) but the rest went down pretty easy at this point. There are some tough undead that can spawn here--in addition to the mummies and wraiths, there are phantoms (basically the same as wraiths) and apparitions. (like extra-tough wraiths that can paralyze in addition to drain levels) If they appear in any numbers they're worth running from.

There are plenty of secrets here, and the stairs to the next level are behind one of them. There's also another "good" pool here, where I made a discovery that I never had previously:

I didn't think this was possible.

Shuten drank the pool again, and gained a point of Dexterity. This is a big deal because 14 is over the maximum natural Dexterity value for trolls. It turns out that "good" pools can raise any stat up to 18, not just to the racial maximum. It also looks like it can't raise any stat higher than 18, so Shuten's CON and SIZ are going to be stuck at 19 and 20, even though Trolls can theoretically go higher.

I almost want to go back and edit that character creation post because this changes the calculus a lot for racial choice. However, there's so much randomness with the pools that this is kind of on the min-maxing side. But if I keep drinking from the pools with Shuten she'll end up a force to be reckoned with.

As you can see from the map, there are two ways down to the next level. One is that chute, and the second is the staircase in the northeast with a sign saying "Your doom awaits" next to it. At first I went down that staircase:

Nope!

That's suicide of course so I decided to try the chute:

Out of the frying pan...

Those are Phantoms. They're basically tougher Wraiths. And there are a lot of them. There's no way I could have toughed it out against all of them without losing a ton of levels, and my MP isn't high enough to take them on all at once. My strategy here was to take them on one at a time with Frank's KAKUSU spell. After finishing a battle I use that spell (it's like Hiding, only it never fails) and simply wait in place until my MP is restored since the Phantoms couldn't find me. Also I spent a lot of MP on fleeing/fear spells (unlike your typical RPG, paralysis/fear/etc works on undead just fine in Deathlord)

After taking on the Phantoms, I used the HITATE spell to get through the fire and through the door on the other side, only to find it was a dead-end:

Ugh.

So it's back through the flames, where I found a secret door out into the rest of the level proper:

As you can see from this map, there's no way I'm getting out of here without going through those Rakhamon's Curtains in the northeast. This level is actually pretty empty--plenty of wandering monsters, but there aren't a lot of features. There are some treasure chambers behind draining walls with coffins that clearly contain undead (Vampires in this case) which I ignored, and then Shumi's chambers themselves. Those are hidden; the standard way in is through the north. There are tons of pits--damaging ones--on the way, and a few warning signs. Finally I got to Shumi's chamber:

Looks like the end of this dungeon...

And in true Deathlord fashion this was just a trap--the tile in front of the door was a teleport trap that sent me here:

Son of a...

You've got three choices here--die, disperse your party, or teleport out with a spell. The second casting of UGOKU took me out this time. If you want to get into Shumi's chambers, there's actually a series of secret doors that will get you in:

There were some undead guards in here too.

Shumi, of course, is just a Necromancer, and easy pickings for my party. He went down very quickly. However...there's no reward for killing Shumi, other than you own personal satisfaction. Now I just had to get out. Unfortunately there doesn't look like there's any way out other than through those Rakhamon's Curtains. Fortunately there's a secret door that will let you out through two rather than four of them, but that's still enough to bring your party down to 25% strength. On the other hand, once you get up to the 3rd floor, it's very easy and quick to get out, which I did with little difficulty. Everyone was ready to go up a level too by the time I made it.

For all its nastiness and dirty tricks, I kind of like the Tower of Shumi. It's got a good theme going with it, and dumb monkey cheese like the "door storage" area aside, the traps and tricks seem fitting for the lair of an evil necromancer. It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination--and I reset the game more than a few times in this run after a few unlucky level drains--but it's one of the better dungeons in the game.

With that, I'm done with Chigaku. I didn't have a concrete destination after this yet--I knew that I had to find a lagoon somewhere but it's not listed on the "default" map. Before I try to search for other continents, I think I'll try to go to the few on the packaged map that I haven't visited yet first. But that'll be in next post.